Snapchat is about to explode in popularity, report says

Snapchat is about to have a couple of really good years.

The company will see huge gains in the numbers of its U.S. users, according to a new report from market research firm eMarkerter.

Snapchat reports that right now it has about 150 million daily active users worldwide. The company doesn't break out how many of those users are in the United States, but eMarketer estimates that the app will have about 58.6 million monthly users in the U.S. in 2016.

But those numbers are set to change dramatically, according to the company's research. The firm predicts that the company will see a 27.2 percent increase in user growth in 2016 and another 13.6 percent increase in 2017.

The report notes that growth will likely stabilize by 2018 with only "single-digit" increases as "the Snapchat audience is expected to be substantially larger than it is today." Still, that's a huge amount of growth for a company that is already outpacing Twitter and many other rivals.

The report also predicts that Snapchat, once known for its predominantly teenage user base, will continue to grow in popularity among older users. The app's U.S. user base is roughly 70 percent millennials right now, according to eMarkerter, but their share is set to go down to just 56 percent by the end of 2020.

That's good news for Snapchat, which is widely believed to be eyeing an IPO for sometime in the not-so-distant future. But before that happens, the company still needs to prove it can reliably make money — and a lot of it. And, as we've noted previously, if Snapchat hopes to realize those goals, it will need to both grow and diversify its user base.

Right now, the company makes the bulk of its revenue from advertising — think sponsored lenses, geofilters and the adds you see in Discover — and a bigger, more diverse set of users will certainly be a boon for both advertisers and Snapchat's bottom line.

Correction: An earlier version misstated Snapchat's current user base. The app has 150 million daily active users.